“Only impossible ones.”
Carmelita took the cup out of her hands and gazed into it with bleary earnestness. “I see children. A great many children, and they all belong to you. Hoh, you don’t believe me? See them for yourself.”
The specks of children on the bottom of the cup, larger than the money, smaller than the dark men. “Tea leaves,” Mrs. Wakefield said harshly. “Such a fraud. I feel cheated.”
She thought of the old gypsy she’d visited when she was Jessie’s age — “This child will have a long and happy life.” She felt cheated, but she would have liked to go on cheating herself: Bring out the cards, Carmelita. Produce your crystal ball, your divining rod, your Geiger counter. Interpret the atoms. Read me the stars.
But the game was over. Abruptly, Carmelita got up and carried the cups to the sink and dropped their fortunes down the drain.
“A cheat,” she muttered. “No, no. It is not me who cheats you. You hoard yourself like a miser. You give nothing and take nothing. What a waste!”
“Hush,” said Mr. Roma. “Lita.”
Mrs. Wakefield stopped him with a gesture. “Let her talk. Let her say what she wants to.”
“Carmelita does not mean to be critical. She is upset because she loves you and would like you to have a rich life, a husband, many children.”
She felt herself disintegrating under the pressure of their pity. “What a fool I am to come back here and listen to your talk,” she cried. “What do you expect me to do — go out and buy me a man so I can have a child? Another child like Billy?”
“Like Jessie,” Mr. Roma said. “A little girl, as pretty as you.”
“Such a cruel thing to say to me.”
Mr. Roma didn’t deny it. He merely looked patient, as if he couldn’t expect her to understand that cruelty was sometimes necessary. “We must all start over again. These eight years have been like a recess from living, now we must go back, you see? Carmelita and I will open a restaurant. We are afraid of failure, of course, but we are excited by the possibility of success. You, too, must learn to believe in possibilities. The little girl like Jessie — she doesn’t exist yet, but she might some day.”
She thought of the day she’d seen the dugong on the rock, and of the later time when she was struggling up through the billows of ether. She had a purpose in her mind but the ether clouded it; she couldn’t remember...
“It’s a boy, Mrs. Wakefield.”
A boy. That was the purpose. “A boy,” she whispered. “Is he — all right? Are his... his legs and arms and eyes — everything all right?”
“Everything’s just dandy.”
“Where’s — John?”
“Mr. Wakefield’s just outside, busy thinking up names. He said you were expecting a girl.”
“Both... Either.”
The girls, Miranda, Linda, Harriet, Jane. The boys, William, Eric, Paul, David, Peter.
“I’ve got a name,” she whispered. “William.”
“That’s nice. A good sound name.”
“Billy for when he’s... he’s little.”
“Sure.” A pause. “Some of them sure do a lot of gabbing when they’re half under. Take over, will you, Hilda? My arms are tired.”
New hands pressed hard on her lower abdomen, and a new voice, Hilda’s, answered her question:
“You can see Billy later on, when you’re feeling better.”
She didn’t see him that day or the next. The unused milk was pumped out of her breasts and they were bandaged very tight, like the feet of Chinese girl babies, to render them useless.
She smothered her anxiety in questions:
“What color are his eyes, John?”
“Blue. Quite light.”
“Which one of us does he look like?”
“Neither.”
“I’d like him to look like you.”
“No one can really tell yet.”
They could tell, of course, immediately. But they didn’t tell her for four days, and then no words were used. She held Billy against her dry breasts. He looked like every other Mongolian idiot that she had seen, except that he was her own.
“It’s hard to start over,” Mr. Roma said. “But you must learn to want things again. Not wanting anything is like being dead.”
“I do want things — to be comfortable, well-fed, healthy...”
“That’s no more than any animal wants.”
I want other things, too, she thought. A child like Jessie, a man like Mark. She said instead, “What will you do if the restaurant fails?”
“Borrow some money and start again.”
“You can always call on me.”
“I would prefer not to borrow from any friend.”
“A friend,” she repeated. “Is that how you think of me?”
“You are our good friend,” Mr. Roma said gravely. “We have shared many things together.”
Many things, she thought. Many sunsets, many tides; the storms, and the dry years. But in the end they were not friends as he thought. She saw now that theirs had been a friendship of environment. Passing, on a city street, he would be only a colored handyman with a Mexican wife, and she a stranger looking for something she had lost.
Since the day in the hospital when she first held Billy in her arms she had always been searching, without knowing it, for the whole and happy baby whose place Billy had taken. It was this baby which had grown inside her womb. Her belly swelled with it, her breasts ripened; its gentle movements were sweet and mysterious. This, this one was her baby, not the impostor, Billy.
Holding the impostor against her breast, she had screamed in silence and despair: He’s not mine! They’ve made a mistake. They’ve mixed the babies up, it often happens, they’ve given me the wrong one!
He was hers, though, and after the first terrible moment of denial she grew to love him. But she never forgot the other baby, the one who had lived inside her womb; the child like Jessie.
The door of Jessie’s room was half-open, and Mrs. Wakefield spoke softly into the darkness:
“Are you awake, Jessie?”
“Sure.”
“It’s getting late.”
Jessie sighed. Adults were always telling her, in a rather accusing way, that it was getting late, as if they held her personally responsible for the passage of time. “I know. I got my watch under my pillow. I’m pretending it’s a cricket.”
Mrs. Wakefield sat on the edge of the bed, and held one of Jessie’s hands between her own. Jessie’s palms were rough with callouses, like a laborer’s.
“I used to pretend things like that, too, when I was a little girl.”
It astonished Jessie that Mrs. Wakefield and Carmelita and her mother had once been little girls, and her father a little boy. She knew it was true, but she couldn’t visualize them whittled down to half-size and getting into mischief and acquiring warts.
“Did you get warts?”
“Sometimes.”
“Were they charmed away?”
“No. But there was an old Gypsy woman living in our town who charmed things away and told fortunes.”
“How?”
“By looking at your hands.”
“Did she tell yours?”
“Yes.”
“Did it come true?”
“I don’t know yet,” Mrs. Wakefield said. “Part of it came true, I guess.”
“I wish I could have mine told. Can you do it?”
“No.”
“You could try,” Jessie said hopefully. “You could just guess.”
“It’s awfully late.”
“Well, I didn’t make it late.”
“That’s right, you didn’t,” Mrs. Wakefield said, smiling. She switched on the lamp, and sat down on the bed again with Jessie’s hand upturned in her own.
“My hands aren’t really dirty,” Jessie explained. “That’s only left-over dirt that got stuck in my callouses and won’t come out. To hear my mother talk you’d think I liked being dirty, which isn’t true.”